Perspectives of School Principals on Mental Health Promotion and Prevention Among School-Aged Children—A 2025 Cross-Sectional Survey in Lodz Administrative Region in Poland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Mental health issues among youth are a growing public health concern. Schools play a vital role in the early detection and prevention of mental health issues, with principals being central to the implementation of mental health initiatives. This study assessed the attitudes, preparedness, and practices of school principals regarding mental health promotion and prevention among school-aged children. Methods: A cross-sectional survey using computer-assisted web interviewing (CAWI) was conducted between March and April 2025. A 19-item questionnaire was sent to all 1564 primary and secondary school principals in the Lodz region. Data from 605 respondents (response rate: 38.7%) were analyzed. Results: A total of 94.9% of the principals reported an increase in student mental health problems over the past five years. Over one-quarter of school principals (26.3%) declared a very good or rather good level of preparation for teachers to work with students diagnosed with a mental disorder. Moreover, 42.3% declared a very good or rather good level of preparation of teachers for conversations with parents about mental health problems observed in their children. Mental health education was conducted in 94.7% of schools, and teacher training in 73.2% of schools. Secondary schools more often offered such training (81.9% vs. 70.7%; p = 0.01) and reported stronger support from specialist teachers (79.7% vs. 67.7%; p = 0.01) than primary schools did. Rural schools rated teacher-parent communication more positively (47.0% vs. 37.7%; p = 0.02) despite fewer training initiatives (68.7% vs. 77.7%; p = 0.01). Suicide response procedures were implemented in 78.5% of schools. Conclusions: The findings confirm a marked rise in student mental health needs and reveal structural disparities in providing school-based support. Enhancing school leadership, expanding teacher training, and ensuring systemic support may facilitate mental health promotion interventions in schools.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".